Haazinu 5786: Building our Sukkah

Haazinu 5786: Building our Sukkah

Oct 3, 2025 | Blog, Rabbi Josh Feigelson, PhD, President & CEO, Institute for Jewish Spirituality

The emotional summit of my spiritual year comes at the end of Yom Kippur. The liturgy for that moment is utterly unique, something we do at no other time of the year: Responsively crying out the Shema and then, seven times, “Adonai hu haelohim,” “YHVH is God.” Then, when we’ve reached the peak, the shofar sounds for a final time and we break out into an ecstatic dance as we sing, “L’shanah haba’ah b’yerushalaim habenuyah,” “Next year in a rebuilt Jerusalem.” 

While I and the people surrounding me have been fasting for 25 hours, we don’t seem to feel exhausted, but rather exultant: light as air, high on the palpable spiritual energy and presence we’ve tapped into. It’s a moment I try to savor every year.

Your own Yom Kippur experience may be like this, or it may be different. I’m in a privileged position of being deeply literate and familiar with the liturgy, having a Jewish spiritual practice in which this peak experience makes complete sense to me, and being physically able not only to sing and dance, but to fast and stand for much of the day. That’s not the case for everyone. 

Yet if we do it right, that final moment of Yom Kippur can be, and often is (I think), extraordinarily inclusive. The energy doesn’t just radiate out from the center, but suffuses the whole room. For this moment, perhaps, divisions can fall away– we can sense equality, we can feel embraced: Not so much “me” or “you,” “God” and “human,”  but rather a whole lot of “us.”

In his commentary on the Shulchan Arukh, Rabbi Moshe Isserlis (1520-1572) notes the custom to begin building one’s sukkah immediately after Yom Kippur, “so that we may go from one mitzvah to the next.” On one level, that might strike us a cute thing to tell children–because how could we imagine being so physically exhausted and then coming home and putting up a sukkah? It’s a nice idea, we might say, but no one really does that. (And, truth be told, I don’t know too many people who do.)

And yet I think the idea reflects a much deeper spiritual sensibility: Once we have reached this amazing point, the state we might analogize to the end of a spiritual retreat, we want to keep it alive–and we want to bring it into the world with us. 

In his Sefat Emet, Rabbi Yehudah Leib Alter of Ger (1847-1905) comments on the Torah’s instruction that “every citizen of the people of Israel will dwell in sukkot” during the holiday (Leviticus 23:42). He cites the Talmud, which says that this verse teaches that “every member of the people of Israel is fit to reside in one sukkah.” The Sefat Emet elaborates: “For there is emunah (faith and trust) and there is bechira (choice and will). On the level of emunah, everyone is equal: we can all have faith and trust in the Creator. But when it comes to choice and will, each of us has our own abilities. In the Zohar, the sukkah is called ‘the shade of emunah,’ because when it comes to emnuah we are all fundamentally equal.”

We live in a time, of course, of profound division–in the Jewish people, in our nations and communities, even in our families, and perhaps even within ourselves. And while we can’t simply will into being the softening of divisions or the deep structural work of reform and renewal, this transition between Yom Kippur and Sukkot can remind us of how a repaired, renewed Jerusalem–by which we don’t only mean the physical city, but the spiritual vision it represents–might feel. May we continue on the journey toward it.

My Fiftieth High Holidays: A Personal Jubilee (Shabbat Shuva 5786)

My Fiftieth High Holidays: A Personal Jubilee (Shabbat Shuva 5786)

Sep 25, 2025 | Blog, Rabbi Josh Feigelson, PhD, President & CEO, Institute for Jewish Spirituality

As I was walking to shul on Rosh Hashanah morning, I did some personal accounting (’tis the season and all). My first “High Holiday gig” was blowing shofar in our minyan in Ann Arbor around age 14. The first time I led Rosh Hashanah Musaf was at the Hebrew Home for the Aged in New Haven in the fall of 1999, and I’ve continued doing that in various places nearly every year since.

But then it occurred to me that this year is my fiftieth experience of the High Holidays. (My father, may he rest in peace, always used to love wishing us a happy birthday by saying, “Mazal tov on entering your Xth year,” referring not to the number signified by our birthday, but by that number plus one: the year it ushers in.) And that kind of interrupted my nostalgic trip down memory lane (High Holidays version) and brought things into a different focus.

Fifty is traditionally thought of as one of life’s bigger birthdays, of course. While my own birthday is still more than six months away, my Rosh Hashanah realization led me to this association:

You shall count off seven weeks of years—seven times seven years—so that the period of seven weeks of years gives you a total of forty-nine years. Then you shall sound the shofar; in the seventh month, on the tenth day of the month—the Day of Atonement—you shall have the shofar sounded throughout your land and you shall hallow the fiftieth year. You shall proclaim release throughout the land for all its inhabitants. It shall be a jubilee for you: each of you shall return to your holding and each of you shall return to your family. (Leviticus 25:8-10)

It occurred to me that this is my Yovel, my jubilee year.

Now the Yovel is, of course, a communal enterprise. It really isn’t meant to be significant primarily for individuals. But I also thought of one of my favorite teachings of the Maharal, Rabbi Judah Loew of Prague (d. 1609), who addresses a good question: Why does the Torah prescribe blowing the shofar to proclaim the Yovel on Yom Kippur, and not on Rosh Hashanah? “The Jubilee and Yom Kippur—the two are really one,” he says. “For the Jubilee is the return of each individual to their original place of security, to be as it was in the beginning. And so too with Yom Kippur: everyone returns to their original place of security as the Holy Blessed One atones for them.” (Gur Aryeh Behar, s.v. “Mimashma”)

The Maharal’s phrase that I’ve translated as “original place of security” is hezkat rishonah, which has a flavor that’s a little hard to capture in English. On a literal level, it’s probably better rendered as “original holding,” as in land holding, which is what the JPS Bible translation cited above does. But the word hazakah connotes something strong (hazak)–i.e. an assumption in which we can place our faith, a place of security.

So what does it mean that on Yom Kippur–whether it’s our first or our fiftieth–each of us returns to our original place, our place of security? Obviously we’re not making a physical return (that is left, in theory, for the Jubilee year). And it’s not as if we forget all that we have experienced and learned in the preceding year.

What I imagine the Maharal is getting at is the idea that Yom Kippur is a day of rebirth, a day the Rabbis understood to be a mikvah in time. At the conclusion of Tractate Yoma in the Mishnah, Rabbi Akiva quotes Jeremiah 17:13: Mikveh Yisrael, “O hope of Israel! O eternal one!” He then plays with the the similarity between the Hebrew root signifying hope, kaveh (like Hatikvah), and the word for ritual bath, mikvah. “Just as a ritual bath purifies the impure, so too, the Holy Blessed One, purifies Israel.” And just as someone who emerges from a mikvah is considered a renewed being–clean and pure–we, upon our emergence from Yom Kippur, are clean, pure, and renewed.

During these ten days from Rosh Hashanah to Yom Kippur, we make reference to the Talmud’s teaching that the books of our lives are open and being written. That can sometimes feel disempowering: It’s all up to God. Or it can feel transactional: If I do good deeds now, then God will write me in the Book of Life. In my experience, that’s a theological posture likely to result in disappointment, if not shattered faith.

A perhaps more helpful alternative comes from the Maggid of Mezritch: “On Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur the ‘writing’ is the thoughts that we think” (Torat HaMaggid Rosh Hashanah). That is, the book is our book, the story of our lives. We are writing it. And the beautiful opportunity of this season is that, no matter what the story has been until now, it really can change with this new chapter.

Gemar chatima tova – May the chapter you write now be one of blessings for you and for all of us.

Rosh Hashanah 5785: Everybody’s Talkin’ at Me

Rosh Hashanah 5785: Everybody’s Talkin’ at Me

Sep 18, 2025 | Blog, Rabbi Josh Feigelson, PhD, President & CEO, Institute for Jewish Spirituality

Reading my friend Jane Eisner’s wonderful new biography of Carole King, I learned about the Brill Building, which sits at 49th and Broadway in Manhattan and, in the 1960s, was the center of the American pop music world. There was King herself, of course, but reading through the list of songwriters and bands that centered around the building one gets the sense of just how extraordinary a place it was: Paul Simon, Burt Bacharach, Neil Sedaka, Neil Diamond, Sonny Bono, Liza Minnelli, Dionne Warwick, and many many more.

(A plug: I’ll be doing a public book talk with Jane on October 23, a couple of weeks before we start teaching our IJS online course “Don’t Turn Away: Reading the News Without Losing Your Mind,” which begins November 3.)

One of the writers at the Brill Building not on the Wikipedia list is Fred Neil, whose song “Everybody’s Talkin'” was made famous by Harry Nilsson, whose version was featured in the 1969 movie “Midnight Cowboy,” and then again in “Forrest Gump” (1994). The song has been covered by over 100 other artists, from Stevie Wonder to Leonard Nimoy (!). (My personal favorite is sung by Jacqui Abbott with the English band The Beautiful South.) Here are its opening words:

Everybody’s talkin’ at me
I don’t hear a word they’re sayin’
Only the echoes of my mind
People stoppin’, starin’
I can’t see their faces
Only the shadows of their eyes

On one level, of course, this is just excellent social commentary. Already by 1966, when Neil wrote the song, the modern world had produced such a cacophony for so many people that millions of Americans could identify with this sentiment. There was just so much noise in modern life, and people understandably longed for some kind of escape:

I’m goin’ where the sun keeps shinin’
Through the pourin’ rain

Goin’ where the weather suits my clothes
Bankin’ off of the northeast winds
Sailin’ on a summer breeze
And skippin’ over the ocean like a stone

Of course, the cacophony only feels like it has grown louder since. When I get on public transportation or an airplane these days, I, like so many others, pop in my noise-cancelling headphones to listen to a podcast, or a guided meditation, or, yes, this very song. Everybody seems to be talkin’ at me—in spoken words and flashing ads and emails and social media and notifications—and I just want to mentally take myself to a place where the sun keeps shining, skipping happily over the noisy ocean like a stone.

Yet Fred Neil knew, as you and I do, that simply escaping the noise isn’t really what we’re really trying to do. What I really want to do—and I expect you, as well—is hear our own voice. As the song’s first words say, it can often feel like we’re hearing only the echoes of our minds—but not the voice of our mind itself. In order to do that, we have to get quiet. And while escaping to someplace less noisy certainly helps with that, it’s no guarantee. Getting quiet is one thing; hearing the still, small voice within us is another.

The seventh Mishnah of the third chapter of tractate Rosh Hashanah reads as follows (based on Koren/Steinsaltz emended translation):

If one sounds a shofar into a pit, or into a cistern, or into a large jug: if they clearly heard the sound of the shofar, they have fulfilled the mitzvah; but if they heard the sound of an echo, they have not fulfilled the mitzvah. And similarly, if one was passing behind a synagogue, or their house was adjacent to the synagogue, and they heard the sound of the shofar… if they focused their heart, i.e. they established an intention to fulfill the mitzvah, they have fulfilled it; but if not, they have not fulfilled it. (It is therefore possible for two people to hear the shofar blasts, but only one of them fulfills the mitzvah.) Even though this one heard and also the other one heard, nevertheless, this one focused their heart to fulfill the mitzvah and has therefore indeed fulfilled it, but the other one did not focus their heart, and so has not fulfilled it.

There would seem to be two related big ideas here. The first is that, in order to fulfill the mitzvah of hearing the sound of the shofar we have to make sure we’re hearing the actual sound and not an echo. Yet stop and think about that for a moment: How do we know what the “actual” sound is? Sound reverberates off the wall, the ceiling, the floor. Unless our ear is right up against the shofar, aren’t we always taking in some aspect of the sound that isn’t “pure?” (And even then: If our right ear is next to the shofar, our left is still picking up sounds that have reverberated around the room.) What is the voice, and what is the echo?

Perhaps the Mishnah is thus already inviting us to a broader conception of “hearing”—one that isn’t strictly limited by physical dimensions, and thus also opens up broader potential meanings. Thus the second, related, idea in the Mishnah: To truly fulfill the mitzvah of the shofar, it’s necessary to engage in kivvun halev, directing the heart. While the Talmud debates whether or not, in general, doing mitzvot requires intention, in the case of hearing the sound (literally the kol, the “voice”) of the shofar, it certainly does.

What does it take to direct our hearts? For some it might be pausing before the shofar blasts to make a mental note: “I’m experiencing these blasts in order to fulfill the mitzvah.” But I would suggest there is a more expansive opportunity for us if we choose to take it.

The language the Mishnah uses, here and elsewhere, to describe one who has fulfilled a mitzvah is yatzah yedei chovato, which literally translates to “has left the grip (yad/hand) of one’s obligation,” or, in abbreviated form, simply yatzah, “has left.” There is motion here, an act of leaving, of going somewhere. On one level, of course, it’s leaving the state of still being obligated to fulfill the commandment of hearing the shofar: once we’ve heard it, we have discharged the obligation, and thus “left.”

But on a deeper level, I think there’s an invitation here to transcend the noise-drenched world in which we live, to go deeper, to go inward. In the voice of the shofar we can, for a moment, leave the cacophonous din of this world and hear other kolot, other voices: The voice of the Divine that called to us at Sinai and, according to the Talmud, still calls to us every day; the still small voice that remains after the storm (to borrow from I Kings 19); the voices of joy and delight, of brides and grooms, in a comforted and spiritually renewed world (Jeremiah 33:11).

“The Torah is not in heaven,” Moses tells us, “nor is it across the ocean… It is on your lips and in your heart that you may do it” (Deuteronomy 30:12-14). Already in Moses’s time, it feels like the world could be a noisy place. It certainly is today. It often feels like so much work to attune to the genuine signals amidst the haze of so many siren songs. The shofar is our people’s ancient spiritual technology for cutting through the noise. This year, may we direct our hearts to hear it, to sense its vibrations deep inside. May the voice of the shofar help us attune to the compassionate, loving Divine voice within each of us.

Rebecca Schisler Receives 2025 Pomegranate Prize

Rebecca Schisler Receives 2025 Pomegranate Prize

Sep 18, 2025 | Blog

2025 Pomegranate Prize recipients with Covenant Board Chair, Deborah S. Meyer (Shulamit Photo + Video)

[New York, NY, September 17, 2025] – Rebecca Schisler, a core faculty member at the Institute for Jewish Spirituality (IJS), received the prestigious Pomegranate Prize given by the Covenant Foundation. She is one of just 10 Jewish educators in the U.S. to receive the 2025 honor and the second IJS faculty member to have earned the coveted designation. The organization presented the annual awards at a reception held on Tuesday, September 16th, at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York, NY.

At IJS, Rebecca leads the development of innovative programming for younger adults, most notably creating the organization’s Shevet Jewish Mindfulness Community, a program for those in their 20s and 30s that includes a 30-minute weekly online practice, an annual retreat, and in-person programming in the Bay Area, Brooklyn, and Cambridge. According to IJS President & CEO Josh Feigelson, Rebecca is transforming how younger adults engage with IJS and with their own practice. 

“Rebecca is at the forefront of a movement to engage young Jews in a Judaism that speaks to them,” he wrote in a recommendation letter to The Covenant Foundation. “It is a Judaism that combines mindful living, meditation, chant, dance, somatic practice, ecological awareness, and earth-based practices—with the depth and richness of our people’s texts, traditions, and the rhythms of Jewish life.”

According to the Covenant Foundation, The Pomegranate Prize “is designed to recognize emerging leaders in the field of Jewish education by encouraging them in their pursuits and offering the resources and connections necessary to accelerate their development, deepen their self-awareness, and amplify their impact on the field.”

“When Rebecca began teaching at IJS three years ago, we had virtually no offerings specifically for young adults,” said Fiegelson. “Since that time, Rebecca has led the creation of weekly online and in-person offerings for people in their 20s and 30s, resulting in more than 5,000 new Instagram followers and dozens of meaningful new programs that have helped thousands of young adults struggling to find their place in American Jewish life today.”

In addition to her leadership role at IJS, Rebecca also teaches mindfulness for Or HaLev and Stanford University’s School of Medicine. Previously, she served as an educator for Wilderness Torah, The Awakened Heart Project, EdenVillage Camp, Urban Adamah, and HaMakom. Rebecca also co-authored the Mahloket Matters curriculum while serving as a senior social/emotional learning consultant at the Pardes Center for Jewish Educators. 

A rabbinical student at ALEPH, Rebecca is passionate about integrating ancestral wisdom traditions with innovative approaches to personal and collective healing and liberation. She teaches Jewish spirituality as an embodied, transformational, and accessible path, with relevant and timely wisdom for all. 

“I’m so grateful for the opportunity to do such meaningful work and for all the ways I’ve been able to grow here at IJS over the past three years,” Rebecca shared with IJS staff immediately following the event. “More than anything, I’m grateful to get to collaborate with such incredible souls.” 

About the Institute for Jewish Spirituality
The Institute for Jewish Spirituality (IJS) is a sacred haven for nurturing the mind, body, soul, and spirit. Since 1999, we have helped countless people navigate our turbulent world by learning to slow down, reconnect with themselves, and find a greater sense of purpose — all grounded in mindfulness and the deep wisdom of Jewish tradition. From guided meditation and contemplative text study to leadership training and retreats, IJS creates opportunities to become more mindful, compassionate, and resilient—and build a more just and peaceful world together.

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Accepting the End, In Order to Begin Anew: Practice for the Days of Awe

Accepting the End, In Order to Begin Anew: Practice for the Days of Awe

Sep 17, 2025 | Blog, by Rabbi Marc Margolius, Senior Core Faculty and Senior Advisor, Institute for Jewish Spirituality

One of the central (and paradoxical) themes of the Yamim Nora’im, the Days of Awe, is that accepting our mortality opens the gate to personal transformation. The extent to which we make peace with the end of our lives helps us begin to live more fully today.

Moses models this kind of radical acceptance as we move towards the end of the annual Torah reading cycle. The Sages imagined Moses vigorously resisting God’s decree that he should die before reaching the Promised Land, moving progressively through the five stages described by Dr. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross in her classic work, On Death and Dying¹: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and finally, acceptance.

His ultimate acceptance of his demise enables Moses to request and extend forgiveness to the people he has led through the wilderness – and to praise God, with whom he has been negotiating furiously:

They [the heavenly court] came and said to Moses: ‘The hour has arrived for you to depart from the world.’ He said to them: ‘Wait until I bless Israel, for they have not found contentment from me all my days, because of the rebukes and warnings with which I rebuked them’ … [Moses] said to Israel: ‘I have caused you a lot of grief over the Torah and over the commandments, but now forgive me.’ They said to him: ‘Our Master, you are forgiven.’ Israel also arose and said: ‘Moses our Master, we have angered you a lot and increased the burden upon you. Forgive us.’ He said to them: ‘You are forgiven.’ They came and said to him: ‘The moment has arrived for you to depart from the world.’ [Moses] said: ‘Blessed be the name of the one who lives and abides forever.’²

In accepting mortality, Moses finds a gateway to forgiveness, transformation, and gratitude, rather than being stuck in blaming and bitterness.

Throughout the Days of Awe, we are like Moses, face to face with our finitude. Yom Kippur is a voluntary near-death experience. We rehearse our own deaths and imagine our own eulogies. We wear white or dress in a kittel representing our own burial shrouds. We recite the Vidui, the confession we are to profess before we die, say Yizkor prayers for those we have loved and lost, remember our martyrs, and end the day as we are meant to end our lives, by chanting the Shema. We abstain from food, drink and sex, freeing ourselves from our customary focus on our bodily wants and needs. These practices enable us, like Moses, to attend to deeper, more enduring truths than our own, inevitably bounded physical survival.

A Hasidic teaching observes that Moses’s awareness that he would die before reaching the Land prompted him to see beyond himself and pray on behalf of the Israelites. Earlier in Deuteronomy (3:23), Moses tells the Israelites, “Vaetchanan el Adonai baeit hahi leimor, I pleaded with YHVH at that time, saying….” (Deut. 3:23). Rabbi Mordecai Yosef Lainer of Izbica (1801-1854) interprets this verse as indicating a shift in Moses’s awareness stemming from the finality of his death:

Why did Moses see fit to tell Israel about this prayer? It might appear as if his prayer accomplished nothing! Nevertheless, through this Moses made it known to the people that his prayer became a protection for them: “Even in your undertakings in the Land of Israel I will be your Rabbi, and so throughout the generations.” He demonstrated to them that he accomplished something through his prayer.

We learn this from the word “I pleaded with (va-etchanan)” – which is in the reflexive form. This means that Moses was filled with supplications, and his prayer flowed in his mouth. This signifies that God aroused him to pray, and so surely this prayer will not return unfulfilled. That is signified in the phrase “at that time (ba-eit hahi)”: Moses said, “Even after the Holy Blessed One had sworn not to bring me into Israel, God nevertheless did not prevent me from praying.”³

In this interpretation, the acceptance of death opens Moses’s awareness even more to the needs of others, allowing prayer to rise organically from concern for them rather than from self-service.

Our mindfulness practice is rooted in hitlamdut, curious, non-judgmental attention to the truth of our experience—in this case, our habitual inclinations about our mortality. Some of us lack the luxury of denial and are forced by illness and/or age to confront death. Some of us struggle with depression and suicidal tendencies, and must practice keeping thoughts of mortality in their proper, healthy place. For those of us who devote much psychic energy to avoiding our mortality, the example of Moses teaches us to turn towards that which we would rather avoid.

Psychologist Marsha Linehan describes this capacity for radical acceptance as “the ability to perceive one’s environment without putting demands on it to be different; to experience one’s current emotional state without attempting to change it; and to observe one’s own thoughts and action patterns without attempting to stop or control them.”⁴ Practicing acceptance is an opportunity to turn towards even that which we most wish to deny. We notice the power of our resistance, and apply compassion rather than judgment; we console ourselves by infusing grief with love.

As we move into this season of death and rebirth, may we receive the deep lessons of accepting (without embracing) our inevitable death. May it help us turn with greater urgency towards life, with more clarity, wisdom, and compassion for ourselves and others. May we envision previously unnoticed transformational possibilities and be freed from that which keeps us bound to old, familiar patterns. May our capacity to accept endings engender myriad beginnings within us and our world.

Taking the teaching into practice:

  • During the coming Days of Awe, investigate with curiosity your relationship with your own death. Can you notice and investigate any resistance to your thoughts and emotions, without judgment?  Can you hold your pain and fear (which of course are completely natural) with compassion and kindness? 
  • investigate purchasing a burial plot (if you don’t have one and intend to be buried), prepare or revise your will, and/or write an ethical will or letter to your loved ones about how you would like to be remembered—or, at least consider each of these, and pay attention to your instinctive reactions.
  • Consider taking a walk through a nearby cemetery and seeing what, if anything, shifts within you when you are in close proximity to mortality.

Taking the teaching into prayer practice: Unetaneh Tokef, a prayer featured in the High Holiday liturgy, includes the deeply challenging reference to “who will live and who will die” in the year ahead. It also includes a passage which goes to the heart of accepting our temporality: adam yesodo mei-afar, our origin is dust.  Experiment with this part of the prayer, using this lovely melody (watch and listen here to a melody sung by Cantor Steve Zeidenberg and choir at Congregation Beit Simchat Torah in NYC; for the audio, click here for the same melody sung by Cantor Ayelet Porzecanski; for classical hazzanut, try Cantor Leibele Waldman’s recorded version.

¹Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, On Death and Dying (New York: Macmillan, 1970).
²Midrash Tanchuma, Vaetchanan 6:2.
³Rabbi Mordecai Yosef Lainer of Izbica, Mei HaShiloach on Vaetchanan (trans. Rabbi Jonathan Slater).
⁴Marsha Linehan, Ph.D., Cognitive-Behavioral Treatment of Borderline Personality Disorder, (Guilford: 2018), p. 147.

 

 

 

Ki Tavo 5785: Perceiving Blessings Clearly

Ki Tavo 5785: Perceiving Blessings Clearly

Sep 12, 2025 | Blog, Rabbi Josh Feigelson, PhD, President & CEO, Institute for Jewish Spirituality

Many years ago when I was a young rabbi working at Northwestern University Hillel, I went to meet Patti Ray at her home. Patti was the longtime director of Hillel at Loyola University, one of our neighboring campuses in the Chicago area. After this long time, I don’t really remember why I went to her house, but that visit has had a lasting impact—because the day that I came, Patti was having her windows cleaned before Rosh Hashanah.

This wasn’t something I had grown up with. While I can definitely remember using Windex and a rag to clean the windows in our house as a kid, that was only on the inside. Patti had hired professionals to clean not only the inside, but the outside. And, having never seen this, I got to experience the dramatic difference it made. With apologies to Joni Mitchell: You don’t know how much schmutz you’ve got til it’s gone. (Or, alternatively, Johnny Nash: “I can see clearly now.”)

This week the window cleaners came to our house and the result is, as ever, transformative. But, of course, it’s not only the physical aspect that makes such a difference. There’s also something about cleaning the windows, and thus being able to see clearly, that is particularly evocative during Elul. For me, it’s a kind of embodied metaphor for the self-accounting, purification, and renewal that the season invites and demands of us.

“When all of these blessings pursue you and overtake you” (Deuteronomy 28:2). This is a frankly strange verse in our Torah portion: There’s the unusual notion of blessings almost physically chasing us—how does that happen? And there’s the odd juxtaposition of this active, subtly violent language (rodef, pursue, is the word the Torah uses to describe Pharaoh’s army chasing after the Israelites, for instance) with the abundant tone of the rest of the verse. How to make sense of it?

One answer comes from Rabbi Mordechai Yosef of Izbicsza: “When one becomes wealthy,” he says, “one changes—they become a different person. Thus this is a special blessing: If all of these blessings of material success come upon you, they will find you as you are—not “puffed up” (nechmetzet, like chametz) and not unmoored.”

Wealth can take many different forms—yes, financial, but in other ways too. “Who is wealthy? One who is happy with what they have,” as Ben Zoma teaches. So one invitation of this reading might be to ask ourselves: How have we grown wealthy—and what changes might that have brought about in us? How may our perception have shifted? How, if at all, might we need or want to re-attune ourselves with our deepest values?

A second reading comes from Rabbi Chayim Ephraim of Sudilkov: “When one is in a more constricted state of mind, one can wind up fleeing from the good—for they don’t realize that it is in fact good for them. Thus King David prayed, ‘May goodness and hesed pursue me’ [N.B. again, the word rodef], for there are times when I don’t realize I should pursue goodness and hesed myself—in such cases, may they chase after me and find/overtake me. Thus the Torah assures us: ‘When all of these blessings pursue you and overtake you’ — that is, they will come upon you and greet you.”

This is a related but slightly different lesson: We can’t always perceive clearly what is actually the good in a given moment. Sometimes—especially when we are harried, when our consciousness is constricted—we can miss the goodness that’s right in front of us, or we only come to appreciate the goodness that was present long after our encounter with it. So the invitation of this reading is to recognize the good that’s present when it’s present.

Elul is a time of spiritual cleaning: clearing off the schmutz both inside and out. One of our goals for that cleaning is to gain greater clarity of perception, to behold what needs change and realignment and the many blessings that are often already present but that we fail to acknowledge. May our practices support us in doing so—for ourselves and for our communities.